Solo sé que sé querer, que tengo Dios y tengo fe.

miércoles, 5 de noviembre de 2014

We the Debian Qt/KDE Team want to early-announce [maintainer warning] our decision to remove Qt4 from Jessie+1. This warning is mostly targeted at upstreams.

Qt4 has been deprecated since Qt5's first release on December 19th 2012, that means almost two years ago!

So far we had bugfixes-only releases, but upstream has announced that they will end this support on august 2015. This already means we will have to do a special effort from that point on for Jessie in case RC bugs appears, so having it in Jessie+1 is simply a non-go.

Some of us where involved in various Qt4 to Qt5 migrations [0] and we know for sure that porting stuff from Qt4 to Qt5 is much much easier and less painful than it was from Qt3 to Qt4.

We also understand that there is still a lot of software still using Qt4. In order to easy the transition time we have provided Wheezy backports for Qt5.

Don't forget to take a look at the C++ API change page [1] whenever you start porting your application.

[maintainer warning] **Remember the freeze** and do not upload packages ported to Qt5 to unstable. The best thing you can do now is to ask your upstream if the code can be compiled against Qt5 and, why not, try it yourself.

Our first priority now is to release Jessie, and this is why this is an early announce.

martes, 30 de septiembre de 2014

Qt 5.3.2 has entered testing a few hours ago. This will be the version of Qt we will release with Debian Jessie, and it happens to be a nice coincidence, because upstream focused in stability for the 5.3 branch.

I'll now focus in fixing as many bugs as possible and in backporting Qt5 to Wheezy.

Let me warn you: if you are an upstream for a Qt4 based project be sure to be ready to switch to Qt5. If you are a maintainer of a Qt4 based project you better start asking your upstream to be ready for it :)

jueves, 1 de mayo de 2014

For quite a while now the KDE team has been severely understaffed. We maintain a lot of packages, with many different kinds of bugs, but we don't have enough people to do all the work that needs to be done. We have tools that help us automate the update to new upstream releases, but that's just the tip of the iceberg of our work and so we are writing to invite more people to get involved in the team and help us get KDE software in Debian into better shape.

Some of the tasks that we need help with are:

Bug triaging: there are many many bugs in the BTS. We need people that go through them, understand the problem and how to reproduce it, confirm that they are still present in the latest versions. In particular, there are bugs affecting the version in wheezy, and we need people to go through those as well.

Bug forwarding: we are so understaffed that we have been asking users to forward the bugs upstream themselves. Some users do this, but some don't. It would help us a lot to have people in the team in charge of this.

Patch forwarding: we have quite a bunch of patches applied in the Debian packages that should be applied upstream. Some need to be generalized instead of being Debian-specific. This work would save us time in the future, so it's very important to get it done.

Upgrade-testing: in the past, the upgrade from one Debian stable to the other has been quite traumatic for KDE software users. We need people to try upgrading from wheezy to jessie and report any bugs that they might encounter so that we can fix them ahead of the release.

Creating patches: many of the bugs that we have require writing patches, some are easy and some are harder, but any help here would be really appreciated.

Packaging other KDE apps: we have packages for the core components of KDE software, but there are many other useful components that still need to get packaged.

The first error that appeared was that QFileDialog does not has a setFilters() method. I couldn't find this on on the C++ API change page but looking at the class' documentation I found it was renamed to setSectionsMovable(). Fine, let's just change that and continue compiling.

The next errors came all from the same class QHeaderView. This time the changes are documented in the above linked page, so it was a matter to replace setMovable() with setSectionsMovable() and setResizeMode() with setSectionResizeMode(). Fixed, let's continue.

The following error turned out to be the last one: toAscii() has been deprecated in favor of toLatin1(). Once this was fixed voilá, QAntenna is running with Qt 5.

As you might know, Qt 4 is now in bug-fixes-only maintenance mode. This means that only bug fixes are allowed to be pushed to Qt 4's repository, but no new features.

On the other hand, Qt 5 is already here. Porting existing apps from Qt 4 to Qt 5 is actually easier than it was to port Qt 3 stuff to Qt 4. Take a look at this Qt project's wiki page for more info. Also pay attention at the links at the bottom of it under "Recommended Reading".